Convention Data Services to expand to new Bourne office

Tuesday

Mar 28, 2017 at 7:03 AMMar 28, 2017 at 7:15 AM

The company's new headquarters may be just a hop down the road, but for Convention Data Services the move to a new facility represents the culmination of 30 years of careful growth and expansion of its business strategy.

Sean F. Driscoll @SeanFDriscoll

BOURNE — The company’s new headquarters may be just a hop down the road, but for Convention Data Services the move to a new facility represents the culmination of 30 years of careful growth and expansion of its business strategy.

Convention Data Services, which offers registration and lead-capture services for trade shows around the world, is building its new headquarters next to its current 107 Waterhouse Road office. The new space, to be located at 7 Technology Park Drive, will be 30,000 square feet, about 50 percent larger than the current space, and will include bigger, more modern workspaces to provide a better environment for employee collaboration, President and CEO John Kimball said. The building also will have several energy-efficient features and an outdoor recreation area for employees and visiting clients.

The construction project broke ground earlier this month and is scheduled to be completed in January, Kimball said, with the company set to move in no later than March 2018. The building will cost $5.4 million, according to town records; financing for the project was completed by Rockland Trust via a Small Business Administration construction loan, according to a statement from the bank.

Kimball said Convention Data Services has been in its current office for about 20 years. The company’s founder, Doug Fletcher, built the site for the firm after it outgrew its original Hyannis headquarters but later sold it, making the company a tenant. When the need for expansion became apparent, Kimball said it was time to become property owners once again.

“The space will help keep the mood fun, productive and collaborative,” Kimball said. “It will really help keep everyone motivated.”

Convention Data Services works more than 200 events per year providing comprehensive registration services, handling everything from online and phone registration to name badge production to onsite services for the show runners and the vendors, which can use a CDSdesigned smartphone app to scan visitor badges to create a database of leads for future sales connections.

The largest event it manages, the biennial International Manufacturing and Technology Show in Chicago, brought 2,400 exhibiting companies spread over 1.3 million square feet of exhibit space and more than 115,000 attendees from 112 countries, according to the company.

Of Convention Data Services’ 170 employees, about 110 work in the Waterhouse Road building in a variety of fields, including software development, sales, quality control, production and distribution, Kimball said. The new building will be able to hold 160 employees.

The new building also will help Convention Data Services with one of its biggest challenges, attracting and retaining quality employees. About 40 percent of its employees commute from off-Cape, Kimball said, the result of the company recruiting in the tech-heavy Boston workforce.

“We make it a selling point,” he said of the company’s location. “We ask them if they’d rather face traffic on a northbound commute or have an easy drive on a southbound one.”